Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[Riamus]

54 minutes ago, Milkshakes said:

@faatal Hi Faatal, I have a question regarding the painting system

'flipping' run-down broken stuff, houses, even neighborhoods is something I rather enjoy as an endgame activity, and yet the current selection of textures is quite scarce

I'm reasonably proficient at texture making and would love to be able to jump on that boat for myself (and others who may feel as i do)

so on that note, are there any plans to facilitate the introduction of new textures into the game?

I've commented on this in the past as well.  I would love to have more textures and would like to see the ability to take a texture and choose a color for it (colors can be limited to the dye colors we have now).  So if you choose a cement wall texture, you can have the texture with a choice of any of the colors without having separate version of the cement wall in different colors as we have now, taking up texture slots.  Of course, some textures can't just be colored... You aren't going to see a log wall texture painted different colors, though I suppose you could if you really wanted to.  And the dark marble floor texture (I forget the name of it) would need to be handled differently to colorize it, but can be done.

 

But beyond colors, more textures would be great.  And I would love to see one that could be used as a straw (or grass) roof texture.  Nice option for a desert POI.

[Prydonian]

1 hour ago, Riamus said:

I've commented on this in the past as well.  I would love to have more textures and would like to see the ability to take a texture and choose a color for it (colors can be limited to the dye colors we have now).  So if you choose a cement wall texture, you can have the texture with a choice of any of the colors without having separate version of the cement wall in different colors as we have now, taking up texture slots.  Of course, some textures can't just be colored... You aren't going to see a log wall texture painted different colors, though I suppose you could if you really wanted to.  And the dark marble floor texture (I forget the name of it) would need to be handled differently to colorize it, but can be done.

 

But beyond colors, more textures would be great.  And I would love to see one that could be used as a straw (or grass) roof texture.  Nice option for a desert POI.

I’m still hoping for more Fancy Stuff, like wallpaper without stains and a dark, polished wood texture that isn’t crown molding.

[bdubyah]

A thought I just had when making some changes to my mod. You guys are making some big changes trying to make water more of a challenge, which I am all for. Any thoughts on doing something similar to gas? I remember MM talking back when you guys removed the pickable gas barrels as he felt it was too easy to build a stockpile of gas. Well, it is certainly still pretty easy to deal with currently. One good mining trip is enough to last you for weeks in game, not to mention any you find/salvage while out and about. It isn't hard to mine a 6k stack of oil shale, which cooks out to 60k worth of gas. Seems a bit easy to me.

[RipClaw]

1 minute ago, bdubyah said:

One good mining trip is enough to last you for weeks in game, not to mention any you find/salvage while out and about. It isn't hard to mine a 6k stack of oil shale, which cooks out to 60k worth of gas. Seems a bit easy to me.

Gasoline has already been made more scarce. Before, you only had to visit an oil factory once and you had enough gasoline for a long time. I don't think the goal is to have to mine oil shale on a regular basis. That would be especially annoying if your base is far away from the desert.

 

[Fanatical_Meat]

2 hours ago, RipClaw said:

Gasoline has already been made more scarce. Before, you only had to visit an oil factory once and you had enough gasoline for a long time. I don't think the goal is to have to mine oil shale on a regular basis. That would be especially annoying if your base is far away from the desert.

 

While probably not realistic at this point in development it would be fun if there was a quest “repair the refinery” and you needed parts to fix it then while producing gasoline it attracted tons of screamers. Basically you’d have to fix and protect the refinery to get an amount of gas that allows you to drive places. Use the shale to trees (less gas per tree). Still could find adequate gas in loot to make moltov’s and stuff but not enough gas for long road trips.

[RipClaw]

52 minutes ago, Fanatical_Meat said:

While probably not realistic at this point in development it would be fun if there was a quest “repair the refinery” and you needed parts to fix it then while producing gasoline it attracted tons of screamers. Basically you’d have to fix and protect the refinery to get an amount of gas that allows you to drive places.

I don't think the oil factory could be protected by a single player. The POI is too big for that.

 

[IzPrebuilt]

please sir can we have some more grue-i mean news 🥺

 

Edited January 23, 2023 by IzPrebuilt
random space (see edit history)

[meganoth]

25 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

I don't think the oil factory could be protected by a single player. The POI is too big for that.

 

 

Not the whole one but lets say one of the rooms with some machinery in it.

 

[Laran Mithras]

I'm fairly certain they've said that there won't be any new textures - they are limited to what they have. Or some such.

[Aldranon]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

Not the whole one but lets say one of the rooms with some machinery in it.

 

 

Then we have the Water Works...  Make WW great again!

 

Then you need to power the whole city by clearing and fixing a nuclear power plant POI.  (A23-24?)

(and guess what zombies are packed into THAT one!)

[meilodasreh]

3 hours ago, Fanatical_Meat said:

While probably not realistic at this point in development it would be fun if there was a quest “repair the refinery” and you needed parts to fix it then while producing gasoline it attracted tons of screamers. Basically you’d have to fix and protect the refinery to get an amount of gas that allows you to drive places. Use the shale to trees (less gas per tree). Still could find adequate gas in loot to make moltov’s and stuff but not enough gas for long road trips.

Yes, long ago I made a similar suggestion as a concept for storymode.

Mine was about establishing a new outpost via protecting some army engineers corps building a new "trader" in a formerly abandoned area.

Large amount of airdrops come in to deliver personnel and materials, and you have to help them survive incoming waves of Zs until barricades and stuff is established.

You would then get new types of missions from there on...

 

I think this would be really cool, at least your point to get some missions to reactivate some critical infrastructure throughout the world.

[Laz Man]

8 hours ago, bdubyah said:

A thought I just had when making some changes to my mod. You guys are making some big changes trying to make water more of a challenge, which I am all for. Any thoughts on doing something similar to gas? I remember MM talking back when you guys removed the pickable gas barrels as he felt it was too easy to build a stockpile of gas. Well, it is certainly still pretty easy to deal with currently. One good mining trip is enough to last you for weeks in game, not to mention any you find/salvage while out and about. It isn't hard to mine a 6k stack of oil shale, which cooks out to 60k worth of gas. Seems a bit easy to me.

 

Rebalanced in A21.  Still WIP.

[BFT2020]

9 hours ago, bdubyah said:

A thought I just had when making some changes to my mod. You guys are making some big changes trying to make water more of a challenge, which I am all for. Any thoughts on doing something similar to gas? I remember MM talking back when you guys removed the pickable gas barrels as he felt it was too easy to build a stockpile of gas. Well, it is certainly still pretty easy to deal with currently. One good mining trip is enough to last you for weeks in game, not to mention any you find/salvage while out and about. It isn't hard to mine a 6k stack of oil shale, which cooks out to 60k worth of gas. Seems a bit easy to me.

This is something I can get behind.

 

I made a few changes on my end and while gas is still plentiful, not as easy to obtained in the past (still testing though).

• Removing the ability to repair items - so having to make choices of doing a ton of mining versus using the tools for base upgrades
• Slower progression on locking the vehicles at minibike or further - finally found the desert after the 4th horde night and still haven't started mining any shale
• Changed the recipe (added requirement of cloth and coal for filtering)
• Even went as far as changing the gas you find in vehicles in pumps / vehicles to gas that first needs filtering to be able to use (and losing a part of it in the process)

It will be interesting to see what changes they made for A21 as hinted by Laz Man in his post.

[bdubyah]

9 hours ago, RipClaw said:

Gasoline has already been made more scarce. Before, you only had to visit an oil factory once and you had enough gasoline for a long time. I don't think the goal is to have to mine oil shale on a regular basis. That would be especially annoying if your base is far away from the desert.

 

What would you consider a regular basis? Once a week? Every 2 weeks? As I said, with a decent pick and some coffee or mega crush it isn't hard to grab a stack of oil shale. And I'd have to imagine even with some generators and other stuff constantly running, 60k gas is gonna last a loooong time. I'd imagine the normal player may not ever need to mine any more for that playthrough. Only players that enjoy longer term games(Day 100+) would really have to worry about getting more. And I wouldn't call having to spend 1 day out of every 30 or so having to worry about it. If the water situation was looked at by TFP as needing to change I can't imagine why they wouldn't feel the same about gas. Exhibit A:

 

1 hour ago, Laz Man said:

 

Rebalanced in A21.  Still WIP.

Good to hear. Thanks, Laz. 🙂

1 hour ago, BFT2020 said:

This is something I can get behind.

 

I made a few changes on my end and while gas is still plentiful, not as easy to obtained in the past (still testing though).

• Removing the ability to repair items - so having to make choices of doing a ton of mining versus using the tools for base upgrades
• Slower progression on locking the vehicles at minibike or further - finally found the desert after the 4th horde night and still haven't started mining any shale
• Changed the recipe (added requirement of cloth and coal for filtering)
• Even went as far as changing the gas you find in vehicles in pumps / vehicles to gas that first needs filtering to be able to use (and losing a part of it in the process)

It will be interesting to see what changes they made for A21 as hinted by Laz Man in his post.

I'm working on reworking vehicles and stuff in my mod. No more vehicle crafting, and nerfing gas even more than I already have. Gup suggested something along the lines of filtering it or needing to refine it somehow. Not a bad idea.

I made it so Grease Monkey controls how much shale it takes to make gas. It starts out as 5 shale makes 5 gas. Max perk makes it 1 shale makes 5 gas. So at best you make half as much as in vanilla. Also reduced how much you harvest from cars and such. Might even reduce how much shale each ore block gives if I feel it needs more nerfing.

Another way to balance it is maybe make the current gas users a bit less efficient. Especially vehicles since we got a mod to help with that. And maybe more things that need/use gas. Why can't the chem bench run off of gas instead of wood? Make it like the chem bench in ARK. Or a better cooking station, like a cobbled together gas stove that uses gas for fuel? Being forced to spread your gas supplies to more areas would also help from it being such a nonissue.

[Milkshakes]

6 hours ago, Laran Mithras said:

I'm fairly certain they've said that there won't be any new textures - they are limited to what they have. Or some such.

I haven't seen that, but confirmation would be nice (mind you, TFP wouldn't have to create any new textures; what I'm proposing is more mods).

However yes, textures are currently finite and a bit of a black hole that, if addressed, could add significantly more replayability.

 

So it'd be nice to get an official response on whether that feature is planned or (if not) how feasible such an expansion would be.

Though seemingly trivial, that is something I believe is worth investigating.

[Javabean867]

8 hours ago, RipClaw said:

I don't think the oil factory could be protected by a single player. The POI is too big for that.

 

Oh it can be fun, I ended up doing a hatch hallway on the ground floor, single file path to me, and walls that I built out to be 3 blocks wide. I then did fallback positions up the stairs and around to one of the offices overlooking the vats.

 

It was definitely a lot of fun early on, because the zombies wanted to tunnel through the side walls.

[RipClaw]

2 hours ago, bdubyah said:

What would you consider a regular basis? Once a week? Every 2 weeks?

About every two weeks.

 

2 hours ago, bdubyah said:

As I said, with a decent pick and some coffee or mega crush it isn't hard to grab a stack of oil shale.

And what if the desert is several kilometres away? Driving several kilometres every two weeks or maybe even every week to mine oil shale would be extremely annoying.

I don't have a problem with spending a lot of time in the mine, but most players might not see it that way. They prefer to loot and explore the map.
 

2 hours ago, bdubyah said:

And I'd have to imagine even with some generators and other stuff constantly running, 60k gas is gonna last a loooong time.

I use up my fuel supply pretty quickly with my auger. 60k of fuel lasts about 4 to 6 weeks depending on whether I also wrench cars in addition.
 

3 hours ago, bdubyah said:

If the water situation was looked at by TFP as needing to change I can't imagine why they wouldn't feel the same about gas.

The situation with water is clearly different. With an empty glass, you had unlimited water from day one. And it's not like there will be a scarcity in A21 in the long run. As soon as you start to build dew collectors, water is won't be a problem any more. As long as a player does not have an increased need for water, e.g. for glue production, two or three dew collectors will be sufficient to cover a player's needs.

 

MadMole once wrote that he wants to balance gasoline so that you can either make short trips every day or a long trip once a week without having to mine oil shale. 

 

[bdubyah]

8 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

And what if the desert is several kilometres away? Driving several kilometres every two weeks or maybe even every week to mine oil shale would be extremely annoying.

Extremely? So spending maybe half a day once every two weeks is annoying? To me, if that's true, then you can just walk or ride a bike everywhere. Vehicles should be more of a privilege that you have to put at least some work in to have.

 

11 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

I use up my fuel supply pretty quickly with my auger. 60k of fuel lasts about 4 to 6 weeks depending on whether I also wrench cars in addition.

4-6 weeks using vehicles, augers, and everything? If so, that's a problem to me. Even if just using an auger for 4-6 weeks, that's still a problem.

 

14 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

The situation with water is clearly different.

Eh, it isn't that different. It's something that should be a point of struggle that can be fairly easily(no, not as easy as water, but still) remedied fairly early into a game. Again, I'd consider that an issue.

 

18 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

MadMole once wrote that he wants to balance gasoline so that you can either make short trips every day or a long trip once a week without having to mine oil shale. 

I mean, that is totally doable right now. Wrenching a couple cars can give you enough to drive around most of the day. While I personally would want that reduced some, it isn't too big of a deal. But I've been mostly talking about oil shale this whole time, as it is too easily mined and produces too much gas for the time invested.

[Roland]

6 hours ago, RipClaw said:

They prefer to loot and explore the map.

 

"They" seem to prefer looting and exploring to building and mining except when "They" prefer building and mining and hate looting and exploring...

[NukemDed]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

 

"They" seem to prefer looting and exploring to building and mining except when "They" prefer building and mining and hate looting and exploring...

hey! thats both of me!

[Grue]

17 hours ago, IzPrebuilt said:

please sir can we have some more grue-i mean news 🥺

 

 

What do you want?

[Annihilatorza]

@Roland @faatal @madmoleWith A21 taking so long and if I am not mistaken this is the longest time between Alphas yet.

 

We are dying for some meaty news, I mean it's been over a year now, I have literally watched my daughter been born and she is now 1.

 

I know you don't owe us anything and you already do so much for this community as is.

 

So thank you so much for everything you guys do!

 

The vehicles update is awesome and all but according to @madmole, you guys were going to try for gold end of this year.

 

Is going gold this year still in the pipeline or has the new changes pushed it WID?

 

Is A21 getting closer to daylight?

 

With the long Dev time of A21 will bandits possibly see the light of day in A21?

 

Are there more environmental hazards besides fire, say toxic gas, electrical, cold, radiation, bio hazard?

 

Will radiation make a return?

 

Will zombie smelling ever return or is it dead and buried?

 

Does water collected from a dew collector need to be boiled?

 

Thanks

Anni

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Aldranon]

3 hours ago, Roland said:

 

"They" seem to prefer looting and exploring to building and mining except when "They" prefer building and mining and hate looting and exploring...

 

They do.

Until "They" drive on horde night through the wasteland, cackling like "The Wicked Witch of the West"!!!

...Well... Thats what I heard "They" do.  

[Blake_]

1 hour ago, Annihilatorza said:

@Roland @faatal @madmoleWith A21 taking so long and if I am not mistaken this is the longest time between Alphas yet.

 

We are dying for some meaty news, I mean it's been over a year now, I have literally watched my daughter been born and she is now 1.

 

I know you don't owe us anything and you already do so much for this community as is.

 

So thank you so much for everything you guys do!

 

The vehicles update is awesome and all but according to @madmole, you guys were going to try for gold end of this year.

 

Is going gold this year still in the pipeline or has the new changes pushed it WID?

 

Is A21 getting closer to daylight?

 

With the long Dev time of A21 will bandits possibly see the light of day in A21?

 

Are there more environmental hazards besides fire, say toxic gas, electrical, cold, radiation, bio hazard?

 

Will radiation make a return?

 

Will zombie smelling ever return or is it dead and buried?

 

Does water collected from a dew collector need to be boiled?

 

Thanks

Anni

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gold, Beta, alpha.... they don't matter if the game ends up being bad. So it will be done when they implement everything they want to implement (paraphrasing Rick's words, who also said that a22 might be ready for this spring, LOL).

 

The a21 main hold up might be the same as a17: perks. Perk redesign and testing, magazine redesign and testing. POIs and Art are just things that do not stop a release candidate, as they can be released when they are done and animated (if it applies) . Let's not forget that there are a few other features coming (water, quests, vehicle damage... etc) that will also be interesting. 

 

Bandits, storyline, clown armor and squirrels will yet again come later, and the game will be better for it. I wouldn't rush out npcs and story if the base world is incomplete.

 

The main selling point of this speech is squirrels. Be careful around them, they sometimes carry disease. Cheers !

 

[beerfly]

21 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

Gold, Beta, alpha.... they don't matter if the game ends up being bad. So it will be done when they implement everything they want to implement (paraphrasing Rick's words, who also said that a22 might be ready for this spring, LOL).

 

The a21 main hold up might be the same as a17: perks. Perk redesign and testing, magazine redesign and testing. POIs and Art are just things that do not stop a release candidate, as they can be released when they are done and animated (if it applies) . Let's not forget that there are a few other features coming (water, quests, vehicle damage... etc) that will also be interesting. 

 

Bandits, storyline, clown armor and squirrels will yet again come later, and the game will be better for it. I wouldn't rush out npcs and story if the base world is incomplete.

 

The main selling point of this speech is squirrels. Be careful around them, they sometimes carry disease. Cheers !

 

Yep, after all their ideas are implemented, a really proper balance should take place. And then call it Gold.